


Bells

by purrslink



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Shock, War, War violence, introspective, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 21:19:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrslink/pseuds/purrslink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>War takes its toll on everyone. The key is getting back up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bells

The shaking was sporadic and almost unpredictable, connected only by the similar dissonance that came with the cling clang clong. He had it under control, he told himself as he dressed the morning after the first night that dust cloyed in his lungs and cicadas buzzed in his ears. Mind over matter. Logic to memory.

He was still telling himself the same lie two years later.

_(Heavy tactile mesh wicked away the blood running down his pointer and index and god damn if every plant in the fucking desert didn't come armed and sharp and dangerous It would scar, but what was one more these days to the criss-crossing collection.)_

He had seen the listless eyes that stared at things long left in sand and jungles and mires of twisted trenches. His situation was neither unusual nor unexpected. To say he was unprepared (which was a blasphemy in of itself) for the eventuality of scars would be laughable. It was nothing he couldn't handle, as he had handled much worse with more grace in years past.

_(Their first clue was that it was so quiet he could hear the grains of sand moving through the cracks of the cobblestones. The shifting sent the smell of heat and sun into his nose and throat, drying his eyes behind darkened lenses. The frayed rope of the parish bells scraped brass and the hinges creaked, but the small town in their small corner of the world was silent.)_

Yet when the time came to pull out the carefully prepared journal with numbers and addresses and references neatly in place he found that he couldn't. As he sat in his tiny apartment with every light on and the doorbell disabled, he pushed it away and simultaneously realized, somewhere deep, just why others died staring off into the past.

_(He'd always been told he had beautiful form even though he had never asked for verbal confirmation. He already knew. His body had always been the paragon of surreptitious strength, all arcs and curves and calculated precision. The secret was in the stillness that came with capability.)_

Though others continued to tell him his form was impressive, impeccable, impossibly perfect, he didn't feel like it was. He played the part and made the shots. But he knew where the tremors lie and when the tremors spoke and the pattern intensified until even the call to prayer rang cling clang clong.

_(It was with those hands that he marked out the distance, ten meters right, five meters left, half back and three with him. The air was wavering now from heat and the cicadas in the palo verde. The desert stepped in but it didn't stay, vibrating through his bones and out through his eyes. When he moved he left it behind.)_

At night, he listened to the sound of sand roaring and loose window flaps howling in the wind. The desert moaned and shrieked around him and try as he may he found that it stayed. His hands shook as he wondered if Captain America had ever lay awake at night and wished that he'd just stayed home that day.

_(The refractory bore the signs of age with grace. The hole in the altar cloth was covered by a bowl and the wax that his boots left indents in on the floor was confined. Pews faced forward through the dusty sunshine, creaking and groaning and waiting silently.)_

Papers got him there, papers sent him away, and finally papers sent him home in time for the first good snow and first cold night of the last month that year. His phone lay in pieces and the journal lay tattered but untouched. As he breathed in the cold night air his calluses and scars clung to the fuzz in worn, overused pockets, missing the long wood handles of Masses of old.

_(Radio silence meant nothing when the bomb tore through the air.)_

He didn't realize how late it was until the bells went off.

_(It was the bells he would hear for days to come. The cling clang clong of the clapper against lip, lip against rim, rim against bead line as they fell. You could say it was the heavenly host descending in fury. You could say it was the announcement of hell. Whatever it was, and he wouldn't be able to decide even years later, it came down with the church and left his ears bleeding with the sound of crumpled brass in his head.)_

As his hands shook with the announcement of Advent he bowed his head and listened over the buzz of cicadas, through the sounds of silence, and past the cling clang clong to the voice that asked a simple question. There was an easy answer to it, he realized, and it was standing in the cold and the snow and the noise, waiting for something to pass it had yet to reach out and touch.

_(He was the only one to rise from the ashes, white skin coated with terracotta dust and blessed in a cloud of gunpowder and holy water. They said he was a phoenix, perfectly formed and terrifying. It was no surprise to him. What he didn't know was why his hands shook in the dark on the ride back.)_

So he reached out after years of forgetting the names and the feel of dust on his throat and the sounds of friendly fire that never should have been. He looked at himself as he shook and asked himself why and though there was no couch in any office of any of those names in the journal it didn't matter as he would have refused anyway. 

He didn't plan on staying long enough to get comfortable.

_(His next leave was long after the scars on his knuckles had faded to thin set white lines. He was changed from the years of sand and sun and shit only in so much that he stared at the length of the toothpaste aisle and wondered why.)_

The first time he heard the ping of the bell in the supermarket ring out and his hands stayed steady he had to leave his basket with the kind older woman at the lotto counter and step into the bathroom no human would ever, in their right mind, use. He locked the door and stared at himself in the mirror and for the first time in years he saw the grace of perfect form in his hands as they clenched stained porcelain.

_(Changed or not his hands stayed steady. Until the Schulmerichs rang that evening. The first intone of C and he couldn't remember anything but cling clang clong.)_

It took two leaves before he found himself back on another cold night in the last month of the year. But he had been ready for it since he'd said good bye to the names in his journal. When he showed up at the large oak door with the patterns perfectly memorized and white gloves tucked neatly into his suit pocket, he was ready.

_(When he stepped outside not even halfway through the carol, his hands were shaking, and they didn't stop shaking until the shadows of night were bleeding into a cold dawn.)_

The C rang out, clear into the rafters and rising with the incense to the lofted ceiling above. It was plain, pointed, perfect. And if his hands didn't shake while he let the cling clang clong that he, and he alone wielded, Phil Coulson didn't mention it to anyone.


End file.
